Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa

The Secretariat at Lusaka publishes the roster, and this catalogue files 21 of them, running from Tunisia and Libya on the Mediterranean to Eswatini in the south, and out into the Indian Ocean to Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles. The list is not the one the treaty drew in 1993. Angola, Namibia and Tanzania are named in Article 1 and are no longer members, and Tunisia and Somalia were admitted in 2018 under a clause that had gone unused for years.

Article 1 of the treaty answers it in three paragraphs. Paragraph 2 opens membership to the states that belonged to the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern African States. Paragraph 3 names Botswana and post-apartheid South Africa, on conditions the Authority sets. Paragraph 4 covers everyone else, and it asks for adjacency: the Authority may admit a state not named above only where that state is an immediate neighbour of a member. There is no export threshold, no income test and no waiting period written into the article.

A single insurance document, established by Annex II of the treaty, that carries compulsory third party motor cover across the members that participate. Each member state designates a National Bureau, guarantees its solvency and sees a deposit of at least ESACU 200,000 lodged as security for its performance. The card names the vehicle, the policy, the issuing bureau and the countries in which it is valid, and it is printed in English, French and Portuguese. Claims are settled by the bureau of the country the accident happened in.

No. Article 4 of the treaty sets convertibility and a payments union as the basis for an eventual monetary union, and Article 73 obliges members to settle payments for goods and services traded inside the common market through the Clearing House until a common central bank exists. What that produced is the Regional Payments and Settlement System, which nets multilaterally and settles in United States dollars and euro through the Bank of Mauritius. The treaty's own unit of account, the ESACU, is defined as one IMF Special Drawing Right and is not money anyone spends.

Burundi, DR Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda do. The Secretariat's brief on the customs union gives the reason it works: the COMESA common external tariff is harmonised with the East African Community's, so a state inside both is applying one schedule rather than two. The tripartite free trade area agreed with the East African Community and the Southern African Development Community, launched at Sharm El Sheikh on 10 June 2015, came into force on 25 July 2024 and is the standing answer to the same problem.

The Authority chose Khartoum as the permanent seat in 2003 and the Court sat there from 2014. On 22 September 2023 the twenty-sixth meeting of COMESA ministers of justice and attorneys general, held at Lusaka, approved moving the registry out of Sudan on a temporary basis. Under Article 26 any person resident in a member state may bring an act of the Council or of a member state before the Court once local remedies are exhausted, and Article 29 puts its readings of the treaty above those of national courts.